The Revolution Devours All

Michael Lindsay, the president of Gordon College, spoke this morning to the Q Ideas conference here in Boston. He, and the college he leads, are under severe attack for holding to orthodox Christian teaching on LGBT. Gordon is Evangelical, but very far from a fundamentalist stronghold. Yet they are seen by many people — many powerful people — as a bastion of bigotry.

Lindsay told the audience about a phone conversation he had with his Congressman when Gordon first got into the news. He said that his Congressman told him straight up that he hated Gordon’s stance, and that he was going to do everything he could to force the college to change it — meaning that he was going to bring the force of federal law, inasmuch as he could, to compel the college to violate its corporate conscience.

This left Lindsay staggered. “There are very few playbooks to tell you what to do when your Congressman shouts at you,” he said.

Lindsay, who is a very soft-spoken man, conceded that Gordon has fallen short of its ideals over the years, “but we are not a place of hate or discrimination.”

How do we as people of faith lead the way, stop being so defensive, and move into the environment in which “we are a real model to the rest of society”? Lindsay asked.

For one, we have to be countercultural, no matter what it costs. On the matter of conformity, he said that social science research shows that people are willing to be wrong if it allows us to get along.

“We’ve traded our desire for moral conviction for a simple desire for relevance,” he said. “We believe in conviction as long as we are liked for that conviction.”

“If we are not willing to [take a stand], it becomes so much harder for everybody else.”

But, he added, it’s hard to know how to do that in the current and fast-changing cultural milieu. It’s hard to know which hill to die on if you can’t see the whole landscape, he said.

Lindsay called Gordon’s travails “the most humiliating experience of my life,” and said that Christians have to keep trying to reach out in love to those with whom they disagree. The church, he says, has demonized plenty of people in the past. We must not fall to that temptation again. He said the following is the most important words he would speak in his talk:

“We have got to show that it’s possible to work shoulder to shoulder with people, even if we don’t see eye to eye.”

Well, I do agree with that, but as his experience, and that of his college, shows, the other side will not give him (us) that chance. Not anymore. Winsomeness is fine — and it’s hard to think of a more winsome person than Michael Lindsay — but it increasingly won’t do any good. We must be loving not because it’s strategically sound, but because Christ commands it of us, and because our opponents are made in the image of God, just as we are. But let us not be under any illusions that this will do us any good anymore, not with most of them.

Andrew Sullivan was next on the stage, and engaged in a conversation with Q leader Gabe Lyons. Andrew — who is far less frantic, and far more serene, than I’ve ever seen him; leaving the Internet was plainly good for his health — was visibly moved by Lindsay’s remarks.

“It’s inimical to me that any religious entity or organization should be compelled by government to compromise any jot or tittle of their doctrine,” Andrew said.

Addressing Lindsay’s case, he said, “Any personal hurt that he experienced, I want to ask his forgiveness for. It really hurts me that people would demonize, stigmatize, and attack people for their religious faith, whatever it is. I think the Gordon College thing is a clear step beyond anything we have seen before.”

Andrew said that there are intolerant people among LGBTs and their allies, “real tendencies to wickedness,” and that he freely acknowledges that.

“I would just ask in return that people understand that for centuries, gay people were thrown out of their own families, thrown out of their own churches, put in jail, hanged in this country, executed around the world. That the gay comm went through an unbelievable trauma in the Eighties and Nineties in which 300,000 young people died.”

Lyons apologized to Andrew on behalf of Christians for vicious treatment of homosexuals. “I know many people did what they thought was right in the name of Jesus,” Lyons said. “I ask for your forgiveness as well.”

“You have it,” said Andrew.

It was a great moment. But there were other things to be discussed. Lyons asked where the lines are to be drawn going forward?

Andrew said that in the early days of marriage debate, when religious freedom would come up, he couldn’t see how gay rights would possibly infringe on it. Who’s going to go around interfering with educational institutions and so on? he asked himself back then. Andrew didn’t see it coming.

His advice to the gay community: quit turning every Christian florist and baker an opportunity for a showdown:

“If you find someone who’s genuinely conflicted about doing something for your wedding, let them be. Find someone else. It’s a free society. Similarly about florists: if you can’t find a gay florist…? It’s not the hardest thing in the world.”

Lots of laughter at that.

Andrew said that we have to be able to get along, to talk to each other, to live in pluralism.

On the matter of Christianity and living a chaste, celibate life, Andrew said that it isn’t possible, that “it’s not happening.”

“It is happening,” Gabe Lyons said.

“Not without psychological damage,” Andrew replied.

He said that sexuality is part of human identity, and his identity. This point is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between orthodox Christians and their opponents. Christianity teaches that sexuality is part of what it means to be a human person, but it is not the defining quality. Chastity has always, since the beginning of Christianity, been a Christian virtue — chastity meaning the right, ordered channeling of sexual desire, which in some instances requires withholding its expression.

Andrew ended his presentation by saying he was glad to come talk to an Evangelical conference because it’s so much better to see people face to face instead of arguing on the Internet, where it’s easy to dehumanize others.

His parting words were, I believe, a shot at me and my presentation the day before (I consider it friendly fire, just to be clear). He said that we must not think of the conflict between pro-LGBT folks and orthodox Christians as a “war,” because “it really isn’t.” He said it ought not be spoken of as an “apocalypse” — a word I used the day before. Perhaps he didn’t grasp that I used it in reference to “the end of the world,” but in its original meaning, which is “an unveiling.” I called Indiana an “apocalypse” in the sense that it revealed to Christians and others concerned about religious liberty where we actually stood in this culture on that front.

Here’s his key statement: “If you make this subject the linchpin for Christianity’s survival — it misses the Gospel.”

Andrew got lots of cheers for that, but I do strongly — but respectfully — disagree.

This raises a critically important question: is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.

Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.

Put simply, the church cannot be the church by being unfaithful to the clear witness of Scripture on the question of sexual behavior (both heterosexual and homosexual), and by deciding that it can jettison the witness and authority of Scripture and Tradition. If you can do this — and many Catholics and Protestants, and even some Orthodox, are doing it and are willing to do it — then what else can we jettison because it’s hard to live by?

As Rieff — again, a visionary social scientist but an unbeliever — recognized, one core thing that makes Christianity different, and that made the early church different from the pagan culture into which it was born, is the way it regarded sexuality and the human person. The church is full of sexual sinners; always has been, and always will be. But if we lose the unambiguous standard of sexual purity, and if we lose the plain understanding within Christianity that holiness depends on submitting our hearts, minds, and bodies to Christ as revealed in Scripture and in the Church — well, then we are lost without a map. A fundamental link is severed.

This is personal to me. As I told the Q audience yesterday, it’s not that I am a scold who resents that others are having more fun than I am. It’s that I was saved in my twenties from the mess I had made of my life by my pursuit of hedonism and sexual individualism. I wanted God, and was determined that I could have him without having to sacrifice my sexual desire, which is to say, order it to what the faith commands. For a short time in college, I attended a church where they gave me no hassle about that. But I knew it wasn’t true. I wanted everything to be okay, I wanted a God who was happy to let me be sexually active outside of marriage. I could not shake the plain fact that this was irreconcilable to Christianity, full stop.

More importantly, it was clear to me that a God I was willing to follow only when the cost of discipleship was something that was easy for me to pay was not a God worth following — indeed, was not God at all. And it was certainly not a God who could save me from my own destructive passions, which, as I point out in How Dante Can Save Your Life, led to a pregnancy scare and the prospect that I would be implicated in the abortion of my own child. Thank God that there was no pregnancy, but the prospect of having to face the nature of my own disordered desires, and the real-world consequences of living them out, pushed me towards conversion.

The church I attended briefly, and which gave me no hassle about my sex life, would never have been an agent of my deliverance from bondage to that particular passion. After I became a Catholic, I got no practical help from any priest or parish in living a chaste life. I was pretty much on my own. But I did have prayer, and I did have the sacraments, and because I had the firm witness of Catholic teaching, rooted in Scripture, about what constitutes a holy use of our gift of sexuality, I had hope that the painful loneliness, and dying to self, that I was undergoing would be for my own salvation. From How Dante Can Save Your Life:

Many Catholics think the Church makes too big a deal about sex; some think the Church should say nothing about sex at all. But practicing chastity after my experience with sex, I understood the Church’s teaching. All the lies I had told myself, and that our culture tells us, about what sex is for left me feeling hollow and unsatisfied.

I didn’t want sex; I wanted love. I mean, yes, I wanted sex, but when it was decoupled from love, that desire was a counterfeit, a false idol. It was destructive to me and to the women I had been with. I realized around this time that by trying to banish that guilty feeling so I could be as free as I wanted to be and thought I had a right to be, I was killing off the most humane part of myself.

When I embraced chastity, I had no idea if I would ever get married. The thought that this might be a lifetime thing filled me with dread. But the prospect of going back to the Egypt from which I’d just been delivered was worse. So on I went, trusting that God knew what was best for me, and that I would rather die to my body with him than live in my body without him.

I was not entirely successful in those first years, but I was a lot better than I had been. Prayer and the confessional helped me with my repentance. Learning to tell myself no was a new thing, and an important one. I learned to steer myself away from getting involved with women who didn’t share my faith and my commitment to chastity before marriage.

My secular friends thought I was a very odd duck because of this. But I didn’t care. I knew what I was being saved from. I knew the kind of man I was and the kind of man I wanted to be. By practicing chastity, I began to understand better the workings of my own heart, and how I had fallen into self-deception (and deceived others) in past relationships.

But here’s the thing: I was still blinded by my habit of exalting romantic love. For my twenty-eighth birthday, my friend Tom Sullivan gave me a copy of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. On a cold February morning, I sat in the living room of my Capitol Hill apartment and cracked open the book. A 1941 letter Tolkien wrote to his son Michael caught my attention. The older Tolkien warned his son to be wary of courtly love, which exalts “imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady.”

“The woman is another fallen human being with a soul in peril,” Tolkien wrote, adding that the courtly ideal “inculcates exaggerated notions of ‘true love,’ as a fire from without, a permanent exaltation, unrelated to age, childbearing, and plain life, and unrelated to will and purpose.”

That was an epiphany. I had thought my high view of women and love was something wholly noble, especially when joined to Christian conviction. Tolkien showed me that I was actually engaged in idol worship of “Love and the Lady,” obscuring the truth and making it harder for me to find what I deeply desired: true love and companionship with a woman.

Later that morning, I took the Betty Blue poster down. I was turning away from the vision of romantic love that books and movies told me was true, because now I knew better.

Later that year, I took a journalism job in Florida, where I made great friends, but none who shared my faith. I had no religious community. From a spiritual point of view, this was the desert. I was all alone, and agonizingly lonely. This was when the purifying flame burned the hottest. All I could do was pray, hope, and keep struggling.

And then I flew to Austin, Texas, one weekend to meet Frederica Mathewes- Green, a friend who was giving a speech. The Texas capital is one of my favorite towns, and I wanted to show her around. On a Friday night, Frederica gave a reading at a bookstore. There I met a University of Texas journalism undergraduate named Julie Harris. The moment I took her hand, I knew that something unusual had just happened.

“Here is a god stronger than I who is coming to rule over me,” said Dante to himself when he first saw Beatrice. That’s how it was with me when I laid eyes on Julie. Nothing like that had ever happened to me—or, as it turned out, to her.

We went to dinner that night, and out for a late coffee on Saturday. We spent Sunday together, and had our first kiss in the parking lot of Waterloo Records. Three days later, me back at my job in Florida and her in Austin, we were emailing, talking about marriage.

It was crazy. But we both knew. Four months later, after only a few weekends spent together but many, many emails and phone calls, I flew to Austin and, kneeling in a chapel in front of an icon, proposed marriage. She accepted. We drank Veuve Clicquot and ate chips and salsa. Late that same year, 1997, we married, and began our life together.

How in the world had that happened, and happened so quickly? Sure, I’m a hopeless romantic, but I am convinced that if my own heart had not been purified by those three years I spent walking through the fire, I would not have recognized that the smile of the beautiful, pure-hearted woman who was my own Beatrice, for whom I had been praying and longing for many years.

So when the pilgrim Dante meets two condemned lovers in the Circle of Lust, they were not strangers to me. I could easily have been one of them. Standing on the edge of the tempest, watching the souls of the lustful whirl by, Dante calls out to a pair physically bound together for eternity to descend and speak to him.

Read the whole thing. The hard, hard teaching of the Church on chastity set me free from my own disordered passions, and purified my heart so that I would be able to give and receive the love of another. I am certain that if not for accepting the ascetic discipline of chastity out of fidelity to Christ, I would not be married today. I would be a much worse mess than I had been in my early 20s. And if it had not been my blessing to marry, I would still rather be wandering in the desert, as hard as that is, rather than mired in the slavery of that particular Egypt.

The churches today that accept an unbiblical and unchristian teaching on sexual morality not only fail to be faithful to what we have been given, they also leave people like I once was stranded in Egypt, and counsel us to see it as the Promised Land.

The irreconcilable difference between my friend Andrew and me on this issue has to do with these issues:

1) What is a person?

2) What is sex and sexuality for?

3) What is the authority of Scripture and Tradition?

But that is a discussion for within the church. Religious liberty is a different, but related, issue.

As much as I would like to say that this is not a “war” we are in, I would point out that the view looks very different from the point of view of men and women who are losing their jobs and their livelihoods, or who are facing that realistic prospect, because of this. An insider at a major US Christian college today sent me a shocking report about some behind-the-scenes activities in which a senior professor is facing the loss of his job for defending his own church’s position on LGBT issues. It’s happening.

The fact that Christians treated gays and lesbians shamefully and unjustly in the past, and some still do today — a sin for which we Christians must repent — does not make this any less of a war. Andrew is not the enemy here. He is not a sore winner, and for that I’m grateful. But a winner he is, and unfortunately, he is not within the LGBT community a Nelson Mandela figure — a personage who fought a long, victorious struggle, and who has the power to lead his winning side to a position of magnanimity and reconciliation. I wish he were able to serve in that role; I have no doubt that he would gladly so so if that role existed. If he and people like him were running the LGBT movement and directing their allies, I would feel much more comfortable about the future of religious liberty in this country.

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141 Responses to The Revolution Devours All

What is with the “give and take”? Are you only prepared to stand on principle if someone else is willing to give you something for it? The right thing (civilly) is the right thing, the constitution means what it means, and it doesn’t matter whether your opponent is magnanimous, surly, offers you a bribe, or withholds even perfunctory thanks.

He wouldn’t give up on it, and repeated that such people are “loathsome.”

That suggests a proper theme song for the resistance to pseudo-aristocratic quasi-intellectual bigots… “Die Gadanken zind frei!”

I see an expression of the same longing for the connection that redeems an animal instinct into a living out of love and commitment.

Now that is the finest one-line argument for issuing marriage licenses to gay couples (and for a church blessing their marriage) that I have ever read. Its a pretty accurate rendition of what marriage is all about too… taking what is basically an animal instinct and harnessing it to create something human, almost divine.

“So long as there are Christians who believe that taking secular power is a necessary step towards bringing Christ to the world, they will be threatened with and some will die by the sword.”

Hmmmm, that provides clearer meaning of what you meant. And I think you are correct, I would agree that bringing Christ, does not require one be in political office or the political space. Christ is certainly beyond that.

But then again, I would that does not preclude Christians from participating in or seeking office to influence secular thinking.

And their faith in no manner is cause for them to avoid the same. It in no manner disqualifies them.

I think we agree on that.

Now allow me to clarify my meaning o the issue of being dragged. The current use of the courts to force anyone to participate in a ceremony they find objectionable (especially behaviors that celebrate behaviors) is in fact dragging Christians. Now in all fairness, my you was generic — not you the direct personal.

To be clear, my force might have gotten in the way of my personal respect for you.

I hope my comments were helpful in understanding my meaning.

But I am unaware of any such Christians who advocate that. There are Christians, and I agree with them that believe their presence stays the hand or the will of God from trashing the entire place.

John… I grew up hearing discussions about the campaign and presidency of John F. Kennedy. I view the situation from the perspective of that knowledge and growing up in a community that was about 80% Catholic.

The religious believer must not use political power to promote his beliefs. JFK was faced with ridiculous accusations, and proceeded to show just how ridiculous they were right up to his violent death.

Prior to that was the final straw, as it were, that pushed the early parochial schools into a mainstream choice: Protestants dictating religious practices in the public schools. Catholics objected to it well before any atheists got all het up about it.

Christians dominated the seats of political power throughout our history. Many of them abused that privilege. At some point, they simply must acknowledge that such a track record is going to have consequences, and there is no such thing as a rational rebuttal that will be listened to unless that acknowledgement is taken to some level of sincere repentance.

The Great Commission is now seen by many — a perhaps soon to be majority — as a great crime.

I’ll meet the implied cynicism of how you phrased your question: the ethical politician is the rare exception, and I don’t care what the category is. Members of Congress are almost all in direct violation of their oaths of office. I do believe that Christians are not the only nor the first target. I also have no tolerance for claims that being a Christian is any recommendation when it comes to ethical conduct, q.e.d.

Rod: When we allow our anger, even if it may be justified, to deny the humanity of those that hate us, we deny the Christ who asked His Father, as he hung from the Cross, to forgive those who nailed him to it. (my emphasis)

Something a lot of commenters (including, at times, myself–mea culpa) need to learn.

I note that I have never so much as voted.
That being said, Turkey is run by ethnonationalists, Saudi Arabia by Wahhabists, and Ethiopia by revolutionaries who have overthrown the legitimate Christian king. I have no particular interest in being ruled by any of those (although the ethnonationalists are probably the most likely to leave me alone.) I have no particular interest in being ruled by liberals either. (I note that a lot of them are Protestants whose sects’ doctrines align with what they are doing in public office.) You know, there is a Unitarian minister in the Kentucky legislature. When a state RFRA was in the works there, and the Catholic Church supported it, he opposed it, saying that anything that the Catholics were for, he was against. I note that it is against canon law for a Catholic priest to run for public office.
Who, then, are you proposing that I be ruled by?
The laws so frequently discussed on this blog do not only apply to non-Christians (or perhaps, more specifically, non-Catholics, since some Christian sects support them) but govern Catholics as well. Are you suggesting that Christians are not competent to govern themselves?

“The Great Commission is now seen by many — a perhaps soon to be majority — as a great crime.”

Ohhh stop. You are teasomg the lines to make a suggestion that is tenuous at best. The great commission is neither a crime nor is there m uch evidence that Christ’s command ” . . . to make disciples of all nations,” ought to viewed as criminal.

Noting the questionable tactics of physical force for the purposes of coversion, is a legitimate question, but healing the sick, feeding the poor and building sanctuaries in remote destitute locations is hardly a criminal act.

uhhhhh,

“The religious believer must not use political power to promote his beliefs. JFK was faced with ridiculous accusations, and proceeded to show just how ridiculous they were right up to his violent death.”

Here we must depart. Because Your lack of specifics ignores the what is their right as to free expression. Political position has a nonexplicit characteristic. It has the managerial, moral and the personal elements that interplay. There is only one thing a christian should not do as to their faith in political office 9at the national/federal level). That is advocate laws that require the establishment by government of religion that requires assent or particiaption by others.

That does not prevent a christian in office from praying while in office, having his Bible on hand, or discussing his or her faith openly (and again christians should participate in the US political system). That there political decisions be influenced by what their faith and practice is certainly permissible. They advocate homosexual conduct should be impermissible by way their faith and practivce as some manner of social moral failing, they are free to do so. I personally think that God has given them multiple nonreligious sound contentions for what they believe to address secularists, but how they choose their political positioning is their choice and protected.
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“Christians dominated the seats of political power throughout our history. Many of them abused that privilege. At some point, they simply must acknowledge that such a track record is going to have consequences, and there is no such thing as a rational rebuttal that will be listened to unless that acknowledgement is taken to some level of sincere repentance.”

Because of the nuances, I think you need some specific examples here. I wouldn’t agree with this generally.
_________________

Ahem, hmmmmm,

I am not sure there is much for the US christian to repent of as a community save “salavery” and the treatment of blacks and “native americans.” And even then — that is very narrow.

About sodomy laws, rarely enforced save in publi expression, prayer in schools, opening prayer at commencements, etc — not at all. Often times what liberals contend is some failing of chritianity is merely the failing of a human being who is a christian. There’s an old saying, “Christians are saved not perfect.”

So a comment such as this,

” . . . the ethical politician is the rare exception, and I don’t care what the category is. Members of Congress are almost all in direct violation of their oaths of office.”

Has such breadth, that some descriptor answering how, here even generally, is encouraged. I might agree, but that would depend on the violation proffered. I would not agree, for example, that laws protecting a parents right to dictate child rearing methods, including dragging the child to aversion or conversion therapies is in any manner a unethical.

I have serious doubts whether any elected or appoited polititcin should be permitted to invest in or own stocks while in office — conflict of interest so obvious it boggles the senses — the public pays them for their service – enough said.

“What is with the “give and take”? Are you only prepared to stand on principle if someone else is willing to give you something for it? The right thing (civilly) is the right thing, the constitution means what it means, and it doesn’t matter whether your opponent is magnanimous, surly, offers you a bribe, or withholds even perfunctory thanks.”

In California a Christian lawyer has filed a resolution with the State AG that would, if passed, require the state to execute gays and lesbians. Why? Because, as the proposed resolution states, failing to do so risks the wrath of God upon our nation.

Last summer an Oklahoma state legislative candidate, Scott Esk, made the same claim, that it is right for the state to execute gays and lesbians as that is the Biblical directive given to human governments.

US Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said in response to the uproar over Indiana’s RFRA that gays and lesbians should be thankful that the state is not executing them as happens in other countries.

Rod commended Andrew Sullivan for speaking out against the extremists on his side of the argument who are attacking the freedom of traditionalist Christians. Many of us on the pro-SSM side see these extremists as part of the far fringe of our movement, more heat than light, and a phenomenon that will eventually run out of steam as their foolishness fails to gain traction. Yet for traditionalist Christians the voice of Sullivan is reassuring, as he directs his comments not into the safety of an echo chamber but out into the rank and file of pro-SSM activists, calling on them to speak out against the stupidity of their more extreme fellows.

What trade off are pro-SSM advocates looking for from traditionalists in this? Perhaps we are looking for an Andrew Sullivan among them. Someone who does not stop with just dismissing the likes of Esk and Cotton and their ilk as not representative of the Christian faith, or who offer an off-handed, one line dismissal of such stupidity in a few blog posts, and then pokes merrily along screaming that the sky is falling.

Is there someone of Sullivan’s stature who could speak directly to the Cottons and Esks in the Christian community and take them to task publicly, as Sullivan has done in his community? If so, give that person a microphone, or plenty of ink. Highlight their words, as you want us to highlight Sullivan’s. Renounce the extreme view of executing gays and lesbians in the same way you want us to speak out against those who would persecute or silence traditionalist Christians.

As you say, Siarlys, it is a matter of principle, of right and wrong. And I would think it would do quite a bit to calm those in the GLBT community who distrust the calls from Rod and others because they simply cannot get the voices of Est and Cotton out of their heads.

Or, you can dismiss all this as mere emotivism, call us all chicken littles, and go back to the comfort of your “rightness” as you continue your protests.

Yes, there can be space for opponents of gay marriage to practice their religion and no they shouldn’t be punished by the government for their opinions and beliefs. However, it is perfectly acceptable for a gay millenial to refuse to vote for someone who wouldn’t go to a gay wedding. I personally wouldn’t vote for such a person either. I wouldn’t vote for Rick Santorum in the slight off chance he was the Republican nominee specifically because I find his attitudes toward gays and women off-putting. He isn’t really that far from Rubio or Kasich on the issues, but I just find the way that he expresses his opinions to be ugly. And that is my right to decide who I want to vote for.

Same with a Christian florist or baker. I probably would be hesitant to do business with someone who refused to bake a cake or arrange flowers for a gay wedding. Again, that is my right as a consumer to do so.

No legislation is going to protect conservative Christians from every negative consequence of holding an unpopular position. Conservative Christians will just have to suck it up and learn that there will be social and economic consequences to holding positions that are out of the mainstream.

I get the feeling you are misinterpreting my intent. Tone from text is too often mistaken, I do that all the time. Allow me to try a different angle. I will stipulate your reasons for never having voted.

The Preamble to the U. S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the no religious test clause together (if awkwardly) introduce a secular morality hitherto unimagined (and unimaginable, in my personal opinion) by existing powers or those struggling to create something new and better.

The first test of that morality, and the ethics it suggested, was the ridicule heaped upon the notion of political parties at the same time many rushed to form them. I will posit that being new, being “divorced” from precedent and holy text, the secular morality was a very frightening thing to jump into blind. It failed aborning, a quiet failure that resonates with me right now.

Fast forward to the mid-70s. My home town just acquired a home rule charter (previously governed solely by state statutes, with no real local control). My mother decided to run for an at-large council seat. Being a lifelong registered Democrat in a Republican machine town (and county), she had very realistic expectations, but not that the Republican party bosses would try to recruit her to switch parties and be their token female. She refused, of course.

I spent a day with her (having my own life going) campaigning door-to-door. About 90% of the conversations went about like this.

Citizen: “Hello, Renee! So good to see you. How are the kids?”

Mom: “Fine, thank you. I’m running for the new council, did you hear?”

Citizen (a bit wary): “No…”

Mom: Launches into prepared delivery of platform.

Citizen: “That sounds very nice. Are you a Republican?”

Mom: “No.”

Citizen: “That’s a shame. I can’t vote for you.”

There is an implied, expected integrity in politics and politicians that mostly doesn’t exist. We are already ruled by ethnonationlists, Wahhabists and usurpers. We just don’t recognize them as such, because they still look and sound like the rest of us.

Aaron Sorkin speaks for me in his script for the movie “The American President” [all emphases added FE]:

President Andrew Shepherd: America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, ‘You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.’ You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

[…]

And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.

——————————————————-

Lewis Rothschild: You have a deeper love of this country than any man I’ve ever known. And I want to know what it says to you that in the past seven weeks, 59% of Americans have begun to question your patriotism.

President Andrew Shepherd: Look, if the people want to listen to-…

Lewis Rothschild: They don’t have a choice! Bob Rumson is the only one doing the talking! People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.

President Andrew Shepherd: Lewis, we’ve had presidents who were beloved, who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.

——————————————————-

A. J. MacInerney: The President doesn’t answer to you, Lewis!

Lewis Rothschild: Oh, yes he does A.J. I’m a citizen, this is my President. And in this country it is not only permissible to question our leaders it’s our responsibility!

John, that last quote about our responsibility will stand as my only commentary on your never having voted. We fail to remind our leaders, forcibly as it is needed, that they in fact answer to us.

Finally, I will also note that I’ve not offered a direct answer to John’s question: Who, then, are you proposing that I be ruled by?

By a citizenry that takes its responsibilities and obligations seriously, that inculcates that secular moral and ethical framework in its children, and acts decisively when an elected representative fails to live up to that framework. That means you, John, along with me and every person eligible to vote. All other considerations are secondary. Want to vote your religious conscience? Please, do. It is very likely a much needed perspective on the current issues. Just don’t expect it to be the only perspective, and do expect to compromise on a common ground with those other perspectives all of which, by the way, must share that same expectation from their points of view.

“Darth, I’m wondering where you get that Andrew Sullivan is (currently) a “diseased lecher” living an “unrepentant bacchanalia” and pursuing his “ongoing sexcapades” with “willfully adulterous, wanton abandon” — as opposed to a married homebody with a husband named Aaron and two cute beagles.”

Well, Andrew Sullivan is diseased; he has an incurable, chronic, and still (alas) life shortening disease that costs us a lot to treat as a society.

Further, well into his campaign for homosexual marriage, Sullivan was advertising for unprotected
hook-up sex (no over 50s, or fatties, please!) on ‘gay’ chatboards. His response to professional homosexual Dan Savage’s call for non-monogamy has been lukewarm, saying only that non-monogamous homosexual couples should exercise ‘discretion’. (This is exactly what most ‘anti-gay’ people want homosexuals to exercise at all times; this is somehow a ‘closet’).

Andrew Sullivan, a practicing Roman Catholic, took a stab at those Christians such as Rob who speak out against homosexual marriage:

“you make this subject the linchpin for Christianity’s survival — it misses the Gospel.”

Basically, Andrew Sullivan exhorts us to overlook our minor disagreements about homosexuality and instead focus on the essential message of the Gospel.

Which is what?, I asked.

Chris1 responds: “Christ is risen!”

Truly, He is risen. But do you mean that in a metaphorical sense, as liberal Christian and the former Bishop of Durham famously preached on one Easter Sunday, or in the literal sense? Liberal and traditional Christians disagree existentially on what this means.

Agnikan says regarding my question: “The word is Old English for “good news”. “Gospel” is actually a Middle English form. The Old English form is “godspel””. Which is quite etymologically, correct, but it begs the question of what “good” is. Is the Gospel “good news” because, as some liberal Christians contend, this good, moral teacher Jesus of Nazareth made an important contribution to the interfaith corpus of moral teachings, alongside that of Moses, Muhammad and Buddha? Or rather, is the Gospel “good news” because, as the 1st Century Christians taught in the Didache, it shows us the only way to salvation and eternal life?

It seems that Christians do not agree about what the resurrection or the good news of the Gospel means.

My point is that we cannot be unified on the Gospel message if we are not unified about how to understand the Gospel–our epistemology. Traditional Christians–Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant- have a high view of Scripture and, generally, a respect for how Christians have timelessly interpreted those Scriptures.

We arrive at both our understanding of Christian sexual morality and the Gospel message by looking to the historic, authentic Christian faith of the Apostles. Liberal Christians, by contrast, looks to a more subjective understanding based on “reason” and perhaps other criteria.

So when Andrew Sullivan turns his back on the traditional understanding of Christian sexual morality, how can he expect to unite with traditional Christians around a common call to share and live out the Gospel?

We are essentially speaking different languages because we embrace different faiths.

Fantastic post. The idea of romantic love is probably the main reason Christians have capitulated so easily on this subject. Mainstream Christians appear to remain extremely committed to the ideal of romantic love, e.g., as a basis and explanation for marriage. This was an attempt, I think, to keep the traditionalist picture from unraveling all the way. Hence it was the first thing they reached for when talking about marriage, and it quickly came to bite them back. It took longer to focus on the underlying purposes of marriage and bring it back to, e.g., children.

Here’s an extremely telling example of where the ideal of romantic love leads you. This is what truly suggests the utopia elites are imagining for themselves—and perhaps for us. This is how they see it all working out:

Note the stakes associated with romance: the author unironically draws an extensive analogy to the multiple-universe theory in physics. And the breathless mysticism throughout. Before I even finished reading the original question, I could tell this would fall into the typical mapping.

Problem: My efforts to pursue my desires and get everything that I want (sexually, from other people) meet with repeated frustration.

Solution: There is nothing wrong with your desires, and nothing you need to change about yourself; the fault lies with society and its oppressive, outdated norms.

As Rod writes in “Sex after Christianity,” the underlying idea is that meaning will come from liberation from the old constraints.

His most recent post about the pleasures of returning home provide a nice point of contrast.

Question that keeps bugging me: Why would anyone who advocates or even just approves SSM have a moral problem with attending a gay wedding? (Re the hypothetical that caused the conservative SSM supporter to call such a person “loathsome.”)

My guess: In either 2016 or 2020, the Republican nominee will be a supporter of gay marriage. And by 2024, if you DON’T support gay marriage, you will not be welcome in the GOP primaries on the national level, since you will be seen as a bigot on the level of David Duke, and therefore not a “real” Republican. Also, Rush Limbaugh or whoever is filling his timeslot at that point will be claiming that Democrats are the real homophobes and quoting anti-gay statements made by Democratic politicians 50 years ago as proof.

Roger II … now you are shifting ground, and moving to much better ground I might add.

IF there are fundamental principles at issue, one works assiduously to make those principles real, not to make them real only if someone will compromise with you. For example, I support the free speech rights of the pro-life movement because I adhere to the Constitution of the United States of America, whether or not Gerard Nadal lets me comment at his web site again.

One of the problems I have with the whole SSM movement in the courts is that it badly distorts the meaning and function of the constitution, ALTHOUGH they have a perfectly valid case to make in the legislative arena.

In the legislature, yes, there is a lot of give and take. The legislature deals with those matters that the federal and state constitutions leave to, or grant to, the legislature, to exercise its sound (or unsound) discretion. And there, one might well reach deals like “I’ll vote for licensing same-sex couples if you’ll support implementing a state insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act.” (Remember, there are “conservatives” who are gay and consider it “loathsome” to skip a gay wedding, so the example is not so far-fetched as certain caricatures of what it means to be “left” might have us believe.)

Franklin, Graney, elite… we must go a few more rounds on this, because we are, slowly and painfully, getting somewhere. To be a Christian is no disqualifier from political participation as a citizen. I’m sure we all agree on that. I would add that any Christian will of course be guided by their moral sense in exercising their franchise as a citizen. There is no way, particularly with a secret ballot, to regulate the motives of a voter.

What becomes evil is when an ORGANIZED body sets forth a political position as binding on all congregants, as the political experession of Christianity.

Franklin touches on Kennedy… the Know-Nothing case against Catholics was that as members of a disciplined, hierarchical faith, they would vote as directed, as a bloc, rather than as individual citizens, and thus the Pope would take over American governance. Kennedy refuted that in many ways, including affirmation that when he takes an oath on the Bible to support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, to violate that oath would be a sin against God. He also promised that if his constitutional duties as president ever came into conflict with his duties as a Roman Catholic he would resign his office.

This is the exact opposite of what Bishop Burke tried to do — he tried to browbeat legislators of the Roman Catholic faith into USING their office to advance the church’s agenda. As I’ve said before, I consider that to border on high treason, or at least blackmail. There were “conservative” Roman Catholics who objected strenuously to what Kennedy said, because they were triumphalists, not unlike many Protestant triumphalists, who fully expected a Catholic president to use his office to advance a “Catholic agenda.”

As elite points out, Christ is on a whole different level from that. And as James Madison reminded us, one reason for separation of church and state is to protect the church from the profane hand of the civil magistrate. (That is not so the church can put ITS hands profanely ON the civil magistrate).

“PS: That YSU experience is instructive in a lot of ways. Back when I was in college in the early 90s, the Left was synonymous with free speech absolutism. Being a hillbilly, I was kind of shocked when I got there and saw people chalking up the whole campus with things about their clitoris, drawing graphic sex acts on buildings, distributing pornographic table tents, etc. All of this was considered protected speech, and now there is about 30 years of precedent.”

The program has been laid out half a century ago by Frankfurt Schoolers, and “tolerance” is a sham since 50 years.

Here it’s just being enacted (BTW, 50 years was also the exact time it took from Marx writing Das Kapital – 1867 – to the Bolschevik Revolution in Russia – 1917.)

““The Great Commission is now seen by many — a perhaps soon to be majority — as a great crime.”
Which is a far far greater problem than gay marriage.”

What utter nonsense. Sharing the gospel and ignoring every aspect of objective reason, uphending thousands of years of research, experience, practical application of the very foundations of human existence and exchanging it for psycholgica musings having no objective foundation whatsoever is more problematic than chaning people’s lives inside and out from a life of drunkeness, rape, murder, theft, drug abuse, and other assorted spiritual and physical dillemmas than —-

Ohhhh good greif, complete and utter nonsense. What a bizzare standard of social and personal positive change.

The social benefit of same sex musings about marriage equality and legalizing the same would not fit in a tea spoon aganst that of the “great commission.”

Actually Christians are pretty good at evangelizing their religion. So most people have heard about Christianity, the problem is that for various reasons they don’t accept or believe it.

For example it’s my understanding that Muslims are aware of Christianity, but they have their own form of supersessionism, and view Islam as correcting errors introduced by mankind with Jesus’s revelation. Plus places like Saudi Arabia ban the public practice of religions other than Islam, so lots of luck winning converts there.

In the US people are constantly exposed to Christian beliefs. Billboards, radio, video, and bibles in hotel rooms. You would have to live under a rock to be unaware of Christianity. Yet the population of religious nones is rising.

I know that in India there’s a substantial Christian community and I saw Christian religious programming on TV. In fact the media situation seemed similar to the US.

It’s been twenty years since I’ve been to Europe, so who knows what it is like now.

“Utah also relies on tourist dollars: skiers, national park visitors etc.
what worked in Utah was compromise, ”

Look, even if the polls which show majority support for ‘gay’ “marriage” are correct (see Bradley Effect), the vast majority of middle class white folks who take ski/snowboard vacations don’t care nearly enough to deny themselves access to that fine powder.

Every time an institution stands up to the bullying (see Chik-Fil-A) it wins.

Elite, with sincere respect, your last post is a waste of space. This part of one paragraph I wrote, which you quoted but need to reread, establishes the basic fact here: At some point, they simply must acknowledge that such a track record is going to have consequences, and there is no such thing as a rational rebuttal that will be listened to unless that acknowledgement is taken to some level of sincere repentance.

I am not offering my personal opinion. I am stating observable facts. I am also not inclined to expand into details and specifics, but VikingLS appears to get what I’m saying. If he is willing to try, that’s his decision.

Opponents of the Christian beliefs in these matters are neither offering nor clearly at all willing to listen to rational arguments. I predict that no attempt to engage them rationally will get any results. I cannot speak for them. All I can do is speak to them as someone they trust and hope that I can get through their emotional barriers.

It’s their perspectives that matter, not because they are correct or accurate, but because they will occupy the seats of power and use that for revenge. It’s already happening in small ways. Rod’s latest post about Hillary Clinton points the way to the next level. I’m becoming decreasingly willing to label his concerns as paranoia.

If any of my kids were to come out as gay, I would not change my belief on homosexuality, but there is absolutely no question that I would continue to love them and to be a part of their lives. Nothing can separate my children from the love of their father.

On a personal note, this touched me. Not exactly my place to ‘thank’ you for that, but thank you.

You may well be right (most tourists don’t give a hoot), but then why are other states falling all over themselves on the matter? I have a hard time believing that people visiting Arkansas or Indiana are any more liberal than those visiting Utah.

I just wanted to say, Rod, that I have never read How Dante Can Save Your Life. But I was very moved by the excerpt you shared. It was inspiring on a day when I needed some inspiration. Thanks for sharing it.

This is the exact opposite of what Bishop Burke tried to do — he tried to browbeat legislators of the Roman Catholic faith into USING their office to advance the church’s agenda.

Well, let’s step back for a moment. We know that there’s been a great deal of criticism of the Catholic Church for not doing more to use its moral authority to fight great evils committed by states in which it was ensconced – to take two examples, the employment of slavery in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, or the atrocities resulting from the race doctrine of the Nazis in the 1930’s and 40’s.

None of which (I hasten to add) means that I am equating the evils that Burke was trying to fight with slavery and Naziism (though slavery, at least, leaves one alive, as a general rule). But I am asking why it is we expect so much out of the Church in acting to stop some evils, but not others. Because whatever you may think, the Church believes, and has always believed, that abortion *is* a grave evil, a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance, and that this is understandable not just from revelation but also natural law – and which imperils the souls not just of the abortionists and those who employ the abortionists, but those politicians, too. As does the reception of Christ in the Eucharist by them when they refuse to repent of those sins.

God Is The Author of Love, Life and Marriage. The question is not who are we to judge, the question is, who are we that we do not desire that all our beloved sons and daughters be treated with Dignity and respect in private, as well as in public?

Love is ordered to the inherent personal and relational Dignity of the persons existing in a relationship of Love, which is why a man does not Love his wife, in the same manner as he Loves his daughter, or his son, or his mother, or his father, or a friend. Any act, including any sexual act, that does not respect our inherent Dignity as sons and daughters, is not, and can never be an act of Love.

Never underestimate the value of a Loving friendship that serves only for the Good of oneself, and the other, but never let one’s beloved become a means to an end- Love, according to The Word of God-
in Loving Christ, we are in Love with Love, He, Who can make all things new again.

What is needed is a personhood amendment stating that from the moment of conception, every son or daughter of a human person, can only be in essence, a human person, a son or a daughter.

Then it will become clear that abortion, is in fact, a violation of our inherent Right to Life and that only a man and woman can exist in relationship as husband and wife.

Marriage equality already exists. Every man is free to choose a woman to be his wife, and every woman is free to choose a man to be her husband, as long as that particular man and woman have the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife. By removing the necessary requirement for a marriage contract, which is the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife, so that in order to be married, it is no longer necessary to exist in relationship as husband and wife, a Judge promotes marriage fraud and the sin of adultery, an impeachable offense.

No judge has the authority to change the letter of the law, even when they desire to give special marital privileges to some persons who do not have the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife.

The Court, in giving special marital privileges to some persons who do not have the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife, and not all persons who do not have the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife, is guilty of discrimination. This unjust discrimination is due to the Court’s failure to understand the essence of personhood and the fact that the marital act, can only be consummated between a man and woman existing in relationship as husband and wife.

The question is not who are we to judge, the question is, who are we as a Nation when we no longer desire to protect the inherent Right of all our beloved sons and daughters to be treated with Dignity and respect in private as well as in public, so that our beloved sons and daughters grow up to be young gentlemen and young ladies, respectful of themselves and others.

The revolution will devour all if our Government continues to view our beloved sons and daughters as a commodity. Slavery, abortion, and the reordering man as an object of sexual desire/inclination/orientation, all deny the essence of personhood.
It is important to note that it is not necessary to destroy a human life to save a human life:http://www.stemcellresearchfacts.org/

This administration has committed to hiring 100,000 Americans with disabilities within the federal government by 2015, and has proposed new rules to create employment opportunities with federal contractors. We are committed to expanding access to employment for people with disabilities and removing barriers to work. The Affordable Care Act is opening access to health insurance to Americans with disabilities who were previously excluded because of pre- existing conditions, expanding access to Medicaid, and helping Medicaid to support home- and community-based services to keep people in their communities. Further, the President issued an executive order repealing the restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and signed into law the Christopher and Dana Reeves Paralysis Act, the first piece of comprehensive legislation aimed at improving the lives of Americans living with paralysis. Democrats are committed to ensuring that Americans with disabilities can exercise their right to vote and have access to the polls. We will continue to oppose all efforts to weaken the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, and we will vigorously enforce laws that prevent discrimination. And the President and the Democratic Party will fiercely oppose the harsh cuts in Medicaid that would inevitably lead to no or significantly less health care for millions of Americans with disabilities, workers with disabilities, and families raising children with autism, Down Syndrome, and other serious disabilities.

Faith. Faith has always been a central part of the American story, and it has been a driving force of progress and justice throughout our history. We know that our nation, our communities, and our lives are made vastly stronger and richer by faith and the countless acts of justice and mercy it inspires. Faith-based organizations will always be critical allies in meeting the challenges that face our nation and our world – from domestic and global poverty, to climate change and human trafficking. People of faith and religious organizations do amazing work in communities across this country and the world, and we believe in lifting up and valuing that good work, and finding ways to support it where possible. We believe in constitutionally sound, evidence-based partnerships with faith-based and other non- profit organizations to serve those in need and advance our shared interests. There is no conflict between supporting faith-based institutions and respecting our Constitution, and a full commitment to both principles is essential for the continued flourishing of both faith and country.